Lines on the Water

by David Adams Richards

  I can’t see it. But it is tiring, and coming to me now. And then suddenly it runs again, and I have to go into the water and follow it, as if I am on a slope in winter and trying to dig myself in.

  Here it jumps, and starts to come back towards me, and I reel slowly, and then hold my rod crooked in my right arm again and back towards shore. After a few minutes I can see it, its tail moving slightly in the rapids, and Peter goes down below it, and comes up behind it.

  “Here it is,” he says.

  After he nets it, he keeps it in the water.

  “You don’t have a camera do you?” he asks.

  “No.”

  It is a great female filled with eggs. No wonder she fought so hard.

  I held her by the tail and under the head, for five minutes or more, until I felt movement come back, and felt her get stronger in my grip, and I released her into the night, in a rip below White Birch on the south branch of the Sevogle in late July of 1995, under an overhanging spruce tree, beside the flat red rock.

  And we turned and walked back to the tent.

  I thought of the salmon Richard Adams brought to my grandmother forty years before, and how I told her that some day I would travel along a river and hook a salmon as well. I did not know then that a Black Dose would make me think of that conversation forty years later, almost to the day, as I bit the fly off with my teeth and looked at its barb, still none the worse for wear. Then I remembered it was Dave Savage who had given me that fly one night long ago, before he travelled to the Restigouche.

  And, too, it seemed only a moment had passed since Richard Adams had carried me down to his canoe where I sat in the stern for the picture that was later misplaced, and stared at the great train trestle and the silent, shadowed, and splendid green water.

  “It’s too bad we don’t have a camera,” Peter said. “An underwater camera,” he said. “We’ll have one when we go bone fishing in Florida.”

  The reason bone fishing attracted Peter was that it looked so esoteric and required patience, and you could see the tails of the fish, as they sulked about the large inlets. I knew he would be very good at bone fishing—or tuna fishing, or any other kind.

  But I doubted if we’d ever get enough money to get there.

  But maybe we would go fishing trout in Labrador, or over to the Restigouche again.

  I changed into sweatpants, and cut up some onions and peeled some potatoes. The stove was going, and tea was brewing. We boiled the potatoes and the grilse in the same pot, and had the onions on a small pan next to the tea.

  He told me a story, and I felt saddened by it. Gordon, my nemesis, and the golden boy of fishing, had taken to poaching, and had been caught, spearing fish in a pool with a spear-gun and a snorkel. He lost his truck and was fined. I never cared for Gordon. Still and all I felt sad about it. Felt sad for his father. Felt sad for the great river, and the fish. And yet it seemed to be as predictable in hindsight as anything else. It seemed as if this was what his look and his objections about me always seemed to signify—just as his trying to get the best deal in trading his hockey and baseball cards did.

  Then it got dark enough not to see anything. The trees behind us, the water in front of us, were unified in blackness. And then the stars came out, thousands of them.

  It was now 1995. My brothers and I were building another camp, on a hill, beyond those very darkened trees by about eight miles. It stood as a testament to my brother John’s great love of the woods, though he didn’t fish and rarely hunted, and his love of canoeing. And it stood as a testament to my love of those same woods, and our family of brothers who never had a camp as children. And it stood also as testament that I would come back to fish again, no matter where I travelled or where I lived. For it was here where I lived. It was here where I wrote, and thought of how complete and uncomplicated life was meant to be.

  So our camp, which was in the process of being built that summer, was the guardian of all of that. Its roof was angled, its shadows warm, while our camp log brought over from our first camp lay on the table.

  I hoped to travel the whole river the next summer. I hoped. I was born without great physical ability, yet I had tested the physical life in the best way I could. I had tested it now for twenty years. This river I had walked a dozen times, and had taken fish in almost every pool. I had done after a fashion, filled with as many false starts and failures as one could imagine, what I had set out to do. And I turned it into my art and wrote about it in one way or another my entire life. This is not a great accomplishment by any means, but it is an accomplishment for me. So then I had told my grandmother the truth that day. I had resurrected from my past life of much uncertainty and clumsiness the fish that I stared at in my grandmother’s kitchen when I was four years old. Perhaps my grandmother knew this. Perhaps she too was watching. Perhaps I remembered that night, or a little later, that that fly, the Black Dose, was given to me by David Savage.

  We heard a splash as a deer crossed the river and went up into the hills just below us, near where I had released the salmon, and towards the place Peter had fallen on the bear when he was not much older than his oldest girl is now.

  I took out my after-dinner close-to-bedtime chew of plug and put it in, and had a spit as Peter lighted a cigarette. And then I knew it was time to tell the story.

  “Once at an old camp,” I began, “a friend of ours came in for a fish. He was a Mr. Simms, and this was a long, long time ago. He had owned the camp when he was young and had built the camp too, but when he went away his cousins had taken it from him. Stole it really and were even proud of the fact that he didn’t complain too much.

  “Now that he was back they told him he could fish if he wanted but he could not be a partner or make any claim to it. Mr. Simms who had owned this camp and had built it as well thought that this was rather cold of them.

  “So they went down the river in a canoe and all the way into the narrows, and all got fish except him, who was a very wise friend and a very good and quite patient fisherman. But he had no luck that day. And so they all teased him.

  “ ‘You can’t fish,’ they said, ‘so what do you need a camp for?’

  “And he told them he was using a wonderful little fly the name of I don’t remember. And that he would get the fish he really wanted, the fish everyone was looking for. It was a fly called Patience and Perseverance and Integrity.

  “So the four of them went back to the camp, and they sat up late at night and played cards and drank, and talked about how wonderful their camp was, and said they wished Mr. Simms had made this certain part different or that a little different, or one angle wasn’t quite right, or it wasn’t flush in just one place. And he sat there very patiently and listened as they complained about his handiwork.

  “ ‘We should get you to rebuild it,’ they said.

  “And just before they went to bed he said he had to leave, and he added, as an afterthought, and as if he was just remembering it, that he had hidden a quart of Black Diamond rum in the camp when he was young, the year he had built it. But that he couldn’t exactly remember where.”

  I stopped speaking and had a spit and Peter looked at me.

  “Now he didn’t get into the camp until a week went by, for he was a walking boss who had to go from camp to camp. And he decided to visit his cousins. For his cousins were hard pressed to get out of the woods, having to cut pulp every day. And when he went to the camp—well, you know how it looked.”

  “No,” Peter said.

  “Well, it looked as if it had disappeared. It was the strangest sight. In fact, you could stare right through the camp and not see a camp at all, except for one opened window, with the glass broken.

  “There was a huge pile where the camp used to be. A door, a shingle, a beam—here and there a dish towel and a cup. Even the outhouse had been turned on its side, and the contents searched.

  “And the cousins? Well they were a sorrowful sight. And they didn’t even notice him. And they were all still
fighting amongst themselves, and blaming each other, with black eyes and pulled hair, and suspiciously searching each other, and rolling about in the dirt, and the canoe had a hole in it.

  “None of them could find that rum. And even until late in life they believed it was there.

  “You could say that they had gone right down to their backing trying to find it. There was a big hole in the earth, where that camp had been—oh, they had dug about eight feet.

  “Well, my friend, the great Mr. Simms got the fish he wanted, for soon, fighting amongst themselves, they left him in peace, and he rebuilt the camp, and except for a few angles it was exactly the way it had been, and he toasted them all with a drink of rum that he had gone to the liquor store to buy.”

  “I see,” Peter said.

  “And that’s how it is when you are fishers of men,” I said, remembering Mr. Simms and his twin brother and smiling.

  “David.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t let anyone else hear you talking like that. I can take it—because I know you.”

  “Well,” I said, finishing my tea, “tomorrow is another day—”

  “Tomorrow we’ll get fish,” Peter said, “I guarantee it. Remember that small pool—when we came in to the South Branch from the other side—walked up from the Narrows Pool and—”

  And then all sounds became unified with the river, and the fire, and the fly dope kept the bugs away.

  The fish move easily in this clear flowing water that is constantly moving against the direction they are going. The male turns right or left past shallows, past boulders, always searching for the channel.

  They move into one of the great hidden tributaries, while others skirt towards some unknown destination. In mid-morning they come to a small falls, and rest beneath it.

  They have come home. Swimming in water running fresh and clean, they feel the sun’s energy; and come for the first time, the first time ever, into the realm of lines on the water.

  David Adams Richards is an award-winning author of both fiction and non-fiction. His novel Mercy Among the Children won the 2000 Giller Prize. He gained widespread recognition for his Miramichi trilogy: Nights Below Station Street (1988), winner of the Governor General’s Award; Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace (1990), winner of the Canadian Authors Association Award; and For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down (1993). Richards’ novel The Bay of Love and Sorrows, published in 1998 received widespread critical acclaim. He lives with his family in Toronto.